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TDS Telecom, a telco with 3,500 employees and a presence in 30 states, is suing the town of Monticello, Minnesota, for trying to put in a fiber optic network of its own. Why would a company try to prevent a town from building itself a faster network? TDS tells us that it's really just looking out for the taxpayer (and its own infrastructure investment). Not satisfied with the current DSL and cable offerings, Monticello hatched an ambitious plan to wire up its entire town with fiber, build an interconnect station, and allow ISPs to link up to the site and offer Internet access over the city-maintained fiber links. After a vote on the measure passed overwhelmingly last year, Monticello moved to break ground and was promptly sued by the local telephone provider, Bridgewater, a unit of TDS. In an August proposal, the city had asked TDS to partner on the work. While both entities were building their own networks, it hardly made sense to do the most expensive, most labor intensive work twice—tearing up the ground, inserting ducting, and running fiber. TDS said no, alleging that such cooperation could be anticompetitive, though it did offer free fiber links to all government buildings and redundant fiber links to schools (which are already served by a state system). Christopher Mitchell, who works for the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and has been heavily involved in the Monticello fiber issue, argued in a piece for the local paper on July 31 that broadband is a utility and that local communities should be involved in providing it."TDS cannot win this case, but it can stall Fibernet Monticello's start-up to buy time for its own hasty upgrades and attempts to lock subscribers into long-term contracts. The City must stand strong during these trying times.
When the 12,000 person city of Monticello, Minnesota voted overwhelmingly to put in a city-owned and -operated fiber-optic network that would link up all homes and business to a fast Internet pipe, the local telco sued to stop them. Wednesday, District Court Judge Jonathan Jasper dismissed the suit with prejudice after finding that the city was well within its rights to build the network by issuing municipal bonds. Chris Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which has been heavily involved in the case, praised the judge's ruling, telling Ars that the entire case was little more than a "delaying tactic." After the Monticello referendum that approved the project, Bridgewater sued the city and immediately rolled out a fiber deployment of its own.
